Read The Big Time for Free Online Page B

hand again, saying, “Sweetling, I’d never heard you call before and knew not this pretty little first,” but she ripped out, “Save your comfort for the Luau,” and I looked and saw—Hey, Zeus!—that one of Ilhilihis’ six tentacles was lopped off halfway.
    That was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: “Remember, he only weighs fifty pounds for all he’s seven feet high; he doesn’t like low sounds or to be grabbed;
    the two legs aren’t tentacles and don’t act the same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles for close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they mean he’s at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted, disgusted; greeting—”
    Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling feather duster and I
    said, “Illy, man, it’s been a lot of sleeps,” and brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little selfcontrol not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little voicebox belted to his side squeaked, “Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?”
    I had, an intelligent one from around a quarter billion A.D., but I didn’t tell him so. I
    stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with one of his tenacles—I don’t savvy feather-talk but it feels good, though I’ve often wondered who taught him English—and watched him use a couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap his wound with it.
    Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated with little death’s heads and crosses with hoops at the top and swastikas, but looking much older than
    Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid, “Quick thinldn, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up gravty unner it, but cud I hay sum hep now?”
    Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my stomach did a ifip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it and carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr’s
    English instructor, must have been quite a character, too. Wish I’d met him—her—it.
    Sid thought to ask fly if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector, but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal gravity doesn’t bother him. As he said to me once, “Would Jovian gravity bother a beetle, Greta girl?”
    I asked Illy about the satyr and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee and that he’d
     
    never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs were from a billion years in the future, just as the Loonies were from a billion in the past, and I thought— Kreesed us!—but it must have been a real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those two for it, with two billion year between them—a time-difference that gives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know.
    I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back from the bar with a big redand-black earthenware goblet of wine—we try to keep a variety of drlnking tools in stock so folks will feel more at home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid’s tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look.
    My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the divan and cried, “Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now destroyed again? It is too much for your servant.”
    Personally, I thought she could stand anything.
    There was a